MOLDOVA’S FALLEN GOVERNMENT SOUGHT TO SAVE ITSELF BY MOVING THE COUNTRY’S EMBASSY IN ISRAEL TO JERUSALEM

The now fallen government of eastern European state of Moldova on Tuesday June 12th turned to increasingly common last refuge of a desperate, disgraced government: Supporting illegal Israeli annexation of occupied East Jerusalem.

DESPERATE ANNOUNCEMENT

The now ex- prime minister Pavel Filip announced that his government would move the Moldovan embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to divided Jerusalem. His government had originally negotiated such a deal last year.

Apparently he did this in the belief that United States and Israel would wave a political magic wand and he would stay in power in exchange of support to breaking international law.

This the Trump and Netanyahu regimes didn’t do or were incapable of achieving in the first place. A troubled government announcing the move of the country’s embassy in Israel to the divided Jerusalem doesn’t – for reasons politicians like Filip seem incapable to grasp – tend to lead to their domestic opponents immediately hoisting a white flag and letting them to stay in power just because it would please US and Israel.

Filip’s turn to US and Israeli help took place in the context of a week-long struggle over who would rule Moldova; Filip’s Democratic Party was pitted against pro-EU and pro-Russian parties’ alliance which was formed on June 8th and has 61 of the parliament’s 101 places. Filip, with support from the Constitutional Court, sought to block the new alliance from taking power and tried to dissolve the parliament, ruling without it until new elections he had announced would be held in September.This he would have done as both a president and a prime minister, as Filip had the court to suspend president Igor Dodon of the pro-Russian Socialist Party and declared himself as interim president. Unsurprisingly neither the new alliance or Dodon gave in just because Filip wanted to so – and the US-Israeli magic wand failed do its political sorcery. After a standoff that lasted from June 9th, with opposition planning a major demonstration for Saturday, the Democratic Party’s power-grab crumble His attempt at strong-man tactics in pieces, on Friday June 14th Filip caved in and his party announced its government would resign; the United States State Department declared that it ‘welcomed the decision’. TRANSNISTRIA

Since 1992 the government of Moldova has not controlled the breakaway territory of Transnistria east of the Dniester river. Transnistria, of whose population many are Russians and Ukrainians, rebelled against the central government of Moldova soon after its independence after the fall of Soviet Union and Russian “peacekeepers” have helped to protect the breakaway local government, under which Transnistria has become one of the most corrupt and unlawful areas in eastern Europe.

One would think that this experience would cause Moldovan politicians like Filip to sympathize and support the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, but then one wouldn’t have expected states like Georgia (part of which is controlled by Russia) and Estonia (occupied by Soviet Union from 1940 until 1991) to support and take part in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Sadly many leading politicians in small countries seem to think that a smaller state has a right to exist in peace without foreign occupation only if the small state happens to be their own – otherwise realpolitik in their opinion dictates that they must help to do to others as has been done to them.